Visual Summary / DVFZ Books
Teach every grade online, one home at a time
What a K-12 teacher can still control once the classroom moves into the student's own house.
Scroll to begin ↓
01 The frame
Online school is a school, and it is not a replacement for one
K-12 covers thirteen grades, kindergarten through the twelfth, with students starting at four or five and finishing between seventeen and nineteen. Moving that online changes where the child sits. It does not change who is answerable for what they learn.
The distinction the book keeps returning to is between online learning and homeschooling. A homeschooled child follows a curriculum their parents choose and shape. An online student is taught by licensed teachers who work for a school, follow that school's curriculum, keep to its schedule and meet the state's standards, standardized tests included. Online students also still have classmates, even if they only ever meet on a screen.
What does not survive the move is experiential learning. Labs, group work, theatre, music and art, and the plain school yard where a child can watch a scientific fact happen. A teacher can play an animation of two objects falling. It is not the same as dropping them.
Online learning came as a remedy to the situation of children who had to go to school without actually going to school. It was never intended to substitute the regular system.How to Teach Online (K-12 Edition)
02 The core idea
The class now happens inside homes you cannot see, and homes are not equal
Online teaching does something no classroom does: it reaches the student where they live. That is the method's best feature and its hardest problem, and it is the same feature.
Some students have a quiet room, a decent chair and a reliable connection. Others share one computer with a working parent and two siblings, and the parent's job comes first because it has to. Some join from a phone on the stairs of their building and cannot make out what you are saying. The book is blunt that favouring the students who happen to own a printer and a scanner would not be fair to the rest of the class. The line between school time and free time blurs too, because the work now happens where the student sleeps and eats, and one common result is a student quietly finishing another teacher's assignment during your lecture.
You cannot fix a household, but you can stop designing the class as though every household were the same one. Recorded lessons and printable sheets let a shared computer be used at any hour. Schools can deliver hard copies, monthly by mail for students who live far out. Almost every town has free WiFi somewhere: a mall, a bus station, the school building itself.
Run an anonymous survey your students know is not graded. Ask what device they use to attend, whether they have what they need to learn from home, and which part of the class is least engaging. Then look at who did not answer. The students who could not open the survey are the ones you most needed to hear from.
03 Ages four to ten
Small children hold on in short bursts, and the best parts happen off the screen
Teaching preschoolers online is genuinely new. Other kinds of online learning existed long before the pandemic; this one did not, and no proper training existed for it. Kindergarten and primary school lay the foundation everything later is built on, and that foundation now has to be laid through a webcam.
Little children have short attention spans and will simply walk away when they have had enough. An empty chair on your screen might mean the toilet, a glass of water, or boredom, and you cannot tell which. So the class has to be built in short pieces with something physical between them. Ask them to find an object of a certain colour in their room. Sing it back. Hold up the drawing.
Ask parents in advance to assemble a kit: play dough, paper and scissors, paint, card. Art class needs materials and materials do not travel down a video call. Music works especially well, because singing and dancing is an interaction a small child already understands, and it makes the class feel less stiff.
Keep every parent's phone number somewhere you can reach in seconds. When a young student vanishes from the screen you can call the home directly, instead of calling the school office and losing the rest of the class while you wait.
04 Ages eleven to eighteen
With teenagers, route the subject through something they already chose
A teenager is not a child and not an adult, and the attitude you get is usually about that, not about you. The advice here is to stop taking it personally and start hunting for the thing they are already interested in, because that is the only reliable way in.
A class with no interest in biology may well be interested in horror films, so have them compare the creature on the screen to the animal it was built from. Find the students who play or sing, and use the lyrics they love to get to writers. Trace the chemical formula they are struggling with to the flavour in something they eat every day. Dismissing the interest as a waste of time closes the only door you had.
Group work matters here for a specific reason. Teenagers want to be noticed and also refuse to be in the spotlight, and a group lets them contribute without standing alone. Praise needs the same care. Too much and a student stops trying, convinced they can do no wrong; too little and the ones working hardest to keep up see no reason to bother. And never say you want someone other than Mary to answer, which tells the class both that they rank below Mary and that Mary is worth resenting.
Replace the raised hand with an emoji reply, so the whole class answers at once instead of one volunteer answering for everybody. For a longer problem, open a shared document and have each student contribute one part of the solution.
05 Assessment
In a remote exam, change the question before you add surveillance
An exam is only worth setting if you can trust the result. Remote exams leak in ways a room never did: a print screen sent to a classmate, a friend operating the computer through remote desktop software, an app that returns a finished answer, a detachable webcam pointed at a student who is not the one typing.
There are controls for the exam itself. Give each class a different test, randomise the order of the questions, watermark every paper with the student's name, set the document to expire once the test is over, use proctoring software to check identity. All of it narrows the channel, and all of it costs you time and a little trust.
The other intervention costs nothing and works better. Change what you ask. If students will have a calculator in their pocket anyway, set problems that require them to use one well. In humanities, ask questions that cannot be answered by copying a passage, only by interpreting one. An answer that has to be reasoned out is not worth stealing, because stealing it does not produce it.
Take the next test and change two items. Turn one into a problem the students need a calculator to solve well, so the device stops being contraband. Replace one whose answer sits in a paragraph of the textbook with one that asks them to interpret that paragraph. And when you do catch someone, hold them accountable: you want your students to like you, but what you need from them is respect.
06 What stays
Hybrid is not a halfway house, it is a third model with its own rules
By March 2021, 30% of students were in hybrid education and over 16% were in exclusively online classes. Hybrid teaching has been in use for more than a decade, and the book treats it as the model most likely to last rather than a stopgap while everyone waits to go back.
Hybrid and blended are not the same thing, and the difference is where the explaining happens. In a blended course the teacher meets the students, sometimes in person and sometimes online, and does the explaining in either place. In a hybrid course the video lesson and the reading are done at home, and the room is reserved for questions, exercises and work done together. Part of the class attends in person while the rest watch from home, and they take turns.
That shifts more of the work onto the student, which suits the disciplined ones and can leave the rest behind. It also makes recorded video the hybrid teacher's main instrument, and a video lesson is not a recorded video call: it needs a script, an edit, a sensible length and a point. The entry floor is set low on purpose, since Zoom and Google Drive are enough to hold a class and collect written work, but everything above that floor is something schools should be resourcing rather than expecting teachers to master alone.
Ask someone to watch your run-through from a second computer, so they get the view your students get. They can tell you whether the links work, whether the visual material shows up on their screen, whether the light needs fixing, and whether background noise is swallowing your words. None of that is visible from your own side of the call.
07 The whole book
One curriculum, thirteen grades, and a room you cannot see
The subject you teach did not change. What changed is the age of the child in front of you and the house they are sitting in, and those two things now decide most of the rest.
The little ones
Short pieces with something physical between them. Ask parents to assemble the art kit in advance. Keep their phone numbers close.
The teenagers
Find what they already care about and run the subject through it. Use groups, so nobody has to stand alone in the spotlight.
The remote exam
Narrow the channel if you must, but change the question first. An answer that has to be reasoned out is not worth stealing.
The book ends on a line worth keeping. The idea that a child cannot have an education without owning a computer and an internet connection is absurd. Education exists to bring young people into the world, and that is far too important to reserve for the families who can afford the hardware.
Adapted from How to Teach Online (K-12 Edition)
Sheryll Piner · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 54 cited sources in the source edition